


Not any sunny tone

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Gen, Music, Vignette, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-02 07:14:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10212317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Anne Hastings had standards, principles and limits. Especially limits.





	

Clayton McBurney had ruined too much. There had been a rhythm at Mansion House before his arrival, a complex harmony among the nurses and the physicians, the nuns weaving in and between like a second, minor refrain, Matron the implacable bass; even with Nurse Mary sick unto dying in a bed upstairs, they’d still have been able to manage and Anne would have been able to be the savior she always declared herself, bringing the woman back from the brink and taking her proper position finally with unanimous thanks. But Major McBurney had disrupted it all, taken the arrangement of the notes and made only a cacophonous noise of their former symphony. He had reduced Anne herself to a char, a housemaid, a simpering skivvy and Byron elevated to a certified physician yet still reviled, threatening to send them both to whatever separate, distant hells he could devise for them. He had waved away her careful request for Lt. Brannan’s deferment, which she’d never told the dead man’s mother, and he’d tried to bind her to secrecy in sending the Baroness to a lonely death, Mary convinced she’d been abandoned by Foster, simply because the Major was obscurely troubled by the shape of her head, not the only shape Anne, who had watched his eyes and where they went, suspected he was ignobly, libidinously troubled by. He unsettled the suffering patients into quarrels and delirium and shouted at the orderlies to give chase to fleas. And he had uneqivocally and irrecovably corrupted not only tarts but peaches. Peaches! Anne Hastings was a Nightingale nurse, however short her Crimean tenure had been, and there were lines that should not, **would** not be crossed. She would see to it.

**Author's Note:**

> A little Anne-vignette for a snowy day-- I know she has a few particular fans out there and she is such a delight to write! I have amended the canon about what happened to Declan Brannan to be kinder to everyone except Clayton McBurney.
> 
> The title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
